Hard work alone won’t rebuild our economy

As usual, I spent Friday morning trying to decide what to write about for today. Then our president made the decision for me.

President Barack Obama chose to talk to the nation about jobs and to do it in my hometown of Elyria, Ohio, just west of Cleveland.

I typically describe Elyria as a nice place to be from because it doesn’t hold a candle to the Northwest in terms of natural beauty. It doesn’t have a mountain range. Everett residents have two to look at.

It does have a great lake, Erie, that is no longer fouled with industrial pollutants. But Lake Erie doesn’t compare to Puget Sound. Cleveland has the Cuyahoga River, which once caught fire so badly that it sparked Congress to pass the nation’s first Clean Water Act and to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Cuyahoga has been cleaned up, too, partly because many of the region’s factories have been shut down. They are not spewing pollution into the air and water — and they’re not providing jobs, either.

During a recent return visit to Elyria, I went by the lakefront steel mill that had employed many of my neighbors in the nearby town of Lorain. It was essentially idle, although there are plans to turn it into an industrial park.

The Ford plant in Lorain shut down in 2005. Last year, its huge parking lot was being used to store Hondas they couldn’t sell right away. At the Ford plant in nearby Avon Lake, they’ve idled hundreds of makers of Econoline vans because the vehicles weren’t selling very well.

I could go on, but the point is that Elyria was a good choice for Obama. For one thing, he was able to make an unscheduled stop to Smitty’s Place, a 75-year-old family restaurant that still makes a great burger. But the main reason Elyria was the right spot is that it’s a part of the nation’s rust belt that has lost most of its good-paying industrial jobs and is still looking for what will replace them.

Obama gave his talk at Lorain County Community College, which I covered as a reporter for several years at the first paper I ever worked for, The Chronicle-Telegram in Elyria.

This was back in the mid-1970s, and I remember being forced to write about the graduation speech of the chairman of the college board of trustees. His message had exactly the same theme every year: “There’s always room at the top.”

What he meant was that no matter what was happening in the job market, there was always a good job out there for young men and women who had some brains and weren’t afraid of hard work.

Some 35 years later, Obama’s speech held some similarities.

“I’ll never stop fighting for an economy where hard work is rewarded, where responsibility is honored, where accountability is upheld, where we’re creating the jobs of tomorrow,” Obama said.

What’s changed in these 35 years is that Obama is putting his money where his mouth is and is pushing for replacement jobs.

“If you’re willing to take the tough and painful steps to make yourselves more competitive, we’re willing to invest in your future,” he said in his Elyria town meeting.

His administration recently provided $24.6 million to BASF Catalysts, a new company in Elyria. And it has provided money to the city’s community college, as it has for many colleges in the Northwest, to create green jobs in the energy-efficiency sector.

“That’s why we enacted incentives that are beginning to give rise to a clean energy economy, that are starting to translate into real jobs making solar panels, making windmill blades, making cutting-edge batteries,” Obama said. “In fact, almost $25 million of our investment went to a plant right here in Elyria that’s helping produce the car batteries of the future.”

Let’s hope for all of us that the administration’s attempts to create new jobs works in Elyria and in the Northwest. At Lorain County Community College, I can attest to the fact that people were being told 35 years ago that hard work pays off.

We need more than that now if we’re going to remake our economy.

Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.